Customer Experience—through the Lens of Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the business landscape (Roggeveen & Sethuraman, 2020). While brands are finding new ways to engage customers virtually, customers are experiencing “virtual fatigue” and crave more relevant and meaningful experiences. Marketers need new directions to drive engaging experiences across the consumer decision journey. Consumers’ rising interest in sustainable brands and demand for corporate sustainability provides an avenue to deliver meaningful customer experience which can ultimately transform customers (Lo, 2020; Smit & Melissen, 2018).

Many researchers have explored customer experience creation and management strategies (Kuehnl, Jozic, & Homburg, 2019; Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). However, few studies have investigated how sustainable initiatives can enhance customer engagement and experience across touchpoints and various stages of the decision journey (Signori, et al., 2019). This Special Issue will contribute to the literature with studies that provide new theoretical and marketing implications in bridging sustainability and customer experience in today’s market environment.

This Special Issue calls for papers which address this area, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Consumer experience journey: There is a growing body of literature examining the customer journey as framework to understand customer experience (Kuehnl, Jozic, & Homburg, 2019; Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). To fully engage customers, marketers must identify and create key moments to nudge the customer towards purchase and advocacy (Herhausen et al., 2019). However, few researchers have explored how to create key moments to make a journey effective, especially in the context of sustainability. With growing demands for corporate sustainability, it will be important to understand the role of sustainable initiatives in creating meaningful moments throughout the consumer journey.
• Sustainability and social media: Social media is one of the most integral touchpoints for engaging today’s consumers. It plays a critical role in marketing communications and building customer relationships and loyalty (Bowen, Appiah, & Okafor, 2020). However, there is a need for a deeper understanding of how various industries and companies leverage social media for bridging their sustainability efforts and customer experience and what factors determine different outcomes.
• The role of offline interactions in sustainable customer experience: As a result of the pandemic, the majority of purchases have shifted from in-person to digital channels, thus changing the role of offline stores or the expected values of in-store experience (Roggeveen & Sethuraman, 2020). Future studies should provide implications on how marketers can leverage offline interactions to create sustainable customer experience.
• The sharing economy post pandemic: In recent years, the sharing economy, which focuses on the sharing of underutilized assets to promote sustainability and social wellbeing, has gained significant academic attention, especially in various service sectors (Curtis & Mont, 2020; Mi & Coffman, 2019). The sharing economy provides numerous avenues to facilitate sustainable customer experience through collaborative and innovative solutions (Curtis & Lehner, 2019). However, post-pandemic peer-to-peer interactions may pose new challenges in addressing health and safety issues while delivering unique and superior customer experience in a sustainable way. Businesses will need a balanced but novel approach to the sharing economy.
• Sustainability and emotional connection: Emotions are a critical aspect of customer experience, but how they influence customer experience and consumption outcomes is not entirely understood (Manthiou, Hickman, & Klaus, 2020). It is important to empirically examine how sustainable initiatives can be effectively designed across various touchpoints to induce a positive emotional connection and shape meaningful and sustainable customer experience that ultimately leads to brand loyalty and advocacy.

We welcome conceptual frameworks, empirical studies, case studies, or other research articles that provide unique theoretical and marketing implications for retailing, fashion, hospitality, tourism and related industries. Papers selected for this Special Issue are subject to a rigorous peer review procedure with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications.

References:

• Curtis, S. K., & Lehner, M. (2019). Defining the sharing economy for sustainability. Sustainability, 11(3), 567. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/su11030567
• Curtis, S. K., & Mont, O. (2020). Sharing economy business models for sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production, 266. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.121519
• Herhausen D., Kleinlercher, K., Verhoef, P. C., Emrich, O., & Rudolph T. (2019). Loyalty formation for different customer journey segments. Journal of Retailing, 95(3), 9-29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2019.05.001
• Katherine N. Lemon & Peter C. Verhoef (2016). Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 69-96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0420
• Kuehnl, C., Jozic, D., & Homburg, C. (2019). Effective customer journey design: Consumers’ conception, measurement, and consequences. Journal of Academy of Marketing Science, 47, 551-568.
• Lo, A. (2020). Effects of customer experience in engaging in hotels’ CSR activities on brand relationship quality and behavioural intention. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 37(2), 185-199.
• Manthiou, A., Hickman, E. & Klaus, P. (2020). Beyond good and bad: Challenging the suggested role of emotions in customer experience (CX) research. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 57. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2020.102218
• Mi, Z., & Coffman, D. (2019). The sharing economy promotes sustainable societies. Nature Communications, 10(1214). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09260-4
• Roggeveen, A. & Sethuraman, R. (2020). How the COVID-19 pandemic may change the world of retailing. Journal of Retailing, 96(2), 169-171. doi: 10.1016/j.jretai.2020.04.002
• Signori, P., Gozzo, I., Flint, D.J., Milfeld, T., & Satinover, N.B. (2019). Sustainable customer experience: Bridging theory and practice. In: Thrassou, A., Vrontis, D., Weber, Y., Shams, S., & Tsoukatos, E. (Eds.), The synergy of business theory and practice, Palgrave studies in cross-disciplinary business research, In association with EuroMed Academy of Business, Palgrave Macmillan: Cham. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17523-8_7
• Smit, B., & Melissen, F. (2018). Sustainable customer experience design: Co-creating experiences in events, tourism and hospitality. New York: Routledge.

Dr. Sang-Eun Byun
Dr. Manveer Mann
Guest Editors

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• Sustainability
• Customer engagement
• Customer experience
• Sustainable brands
• Sustainability communication
• Corporate sustainability
• Consumer decision journey
• Social media strategy
• Sharing economy post pandemic
• Emotional connection